Today, Silicon Valley venture capitalist and Facebook board member Marc Andreessen jumped into the discussion with tweets comparing Free Basics to colonialism and suggesting that Indians were heading for economic disaster by banning it.

Responding to India's telecom regulator's recent prohibitory order on differential pricing for data, Andressen began by calling the ban on Free Basics "morally wrong", and went on to tweet that "anti-colonialism" had been "economically catastrophic for Indian people for decades."

The tweet was soon deleted by Andreessen, but was widely shared on Twitter and sparked off online protests. Several Twitter users questioned Andreessen's ill-informed perspective and said it explained why Facebook's Free Basics strategy of offering limited Internet access went wrong in India.

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